Saturday, 1 October 2016

Recently while browsing through my VMware repository, I came across EMC Data Domain Virtual Edition. Before this, the only time where I worked on EMC DD cases where on a web ex, which had integration / backup issues between VDP and Data-Domain. Currently, my expertise on Data-Domain is limited and with this appliance edition, you can expect more updates on VDP-DD issues.

First things first, this article is going to be about deploying the virtual edition of Data-Domain and configuring it to VDP. You can say this is the initial setup. I am going to skip certain parts such as OVF deployment as I take into account this is already known to you.

1. The Data Domain ova can be acquired from the EMC download site. It contains and ovf file, vmdk file and .mf (manifest) file.

A prerequisite would be to have your DNS Forward/Reverse configured for your DD Appliance. Once this is in place, use either the web client or the vSphere Client to complete your deployment. Do not power On the appliance post deployment.

2. Once the deployment is complete, if you go to the Edit Settings of the Data Domain Appliance, you can see that there are two hard drives for your system, 120GB and 10GB. These are your system drives and you will need to add an additional drive (500GB) for storing the backup data. At this point, you can go ahead and perform an "Add Device" operation and add a new vmdk of 500GB in size. Post successful addition of the drive, go ahead and power on the data domain appliance.

3. The default credentials are username: sysadmin, password: abc123. At this point of time, there will be a script that will be executed automatically to configure network. I have not included this in the screenshot as it is fairly simple task. The options will be configure IPv4 network, IP address, DNS Server address, hostname, domain name, subnet mask and default gateway. IPv6 is optional and can be ignored if not required. This prompt will also ask you if you would like to change the password for sysadmin.

4. The next step is to add the 500GB storage that was created for this appliance. Run the following command in the SSH of the data domain appliance to add the 500GB disk.

# storage add dev3

This would be seen as:

5. Once the additional disk is added to the active tier, you then need to create a file system on this. Run the following command to create a file system:

# filesys create

This would be seen as:

This will provision the storage and create the FS. The progress will be displayed once the prompt is acknowledged with "yes" as above.

6. Once the file system is created, the next part is to enable the file system, which again is done by a pretty simple command:

# filesys enable

Note that, this is not a Full Linux OS, so most to almost all Linux commands will not work on a data domain. The Data domain has it's own OS, DD-OS which has a set of commands that are only supported.

The output for enabling file system would be seen as:

Perform a restart of the data domain appliance before proceeding with the next steps.

7. Once the reboot is completed, open a browser and go to the following link:

https://data-domain-ip/ddem

If you see an unable to connect message in the browser, then go back to the SSH and run the following command:

So the ports are already set, however, the services are not enabled. So we need to enable http and https services here. The command would be:

sysadmin@datadomain# adminaccess enable http
HTTP Access: enabled

sysadmin@datadomain# adminaccess enable https
HTTPS Access: enabled

This should do the trick, and now you should be able to login to the data domain manager from the browser.

The login username would be sysadmin and the password for this user. (Either default if you chose not to change it in SSH or the newly configured password)

8. Now, the VDP connects to the data domain via a ddboost user. You need to create a ddboost user with admin rights, and enable ddboost. This can be done from the GUI or from the command line. The command line is much easier.

The first step would be to "add" a ddboost user:

# user add ddboost-user password VMware123!

The next step would be to "set" the created ddboost user:

# ddboost set user-name ddboost-user

The last step would be to enable ddboost:

# ddboost enable

You can also check ddboost status with:

# ddboost status

This will automatically reflect in the GUI. The location for ddboost in web manager of data domain is. Data Management > DD Boost > Settings. So, if you choose not to add the user from command line, you can do the same from here.

9. Now, you need to grant this ddboost user the admin rights, else, you will get the following error during connecting the data domain to the VDP appliance:

To grant the ddboost user with admin rights, from the web GUI navigate to System Settings > Access Management > Local Users. Check the ddboost user and select the Edit option, From the management role drop-down select admin > Click OK.

10. Post this, there is one more small configuration required for connecting the VDP appliance. This would be the NTP settings. From the data domain web GUI navigate to System Settings > General Configuration > Time and Date Settings and add your NTP Server.

11. With this completed, now we will go ahead and connect this data domain to the VDP appliance.

Login to the vdp-configure page at:

https://vdp-ip:8543/vdp-configure

12. Click Storage > Gear Icon > Add Data Domain

13. Provide the primary IP of the data domain, the ddboost user and password and select Enable Checkpoint Copy.

14. Enter the community string for the SNMP configuration.

Once the data domain addition completes successfully, you should be able to see the data domain storage details under the "Storage" section:

If you SSH into the VDP appliance and navigate to /usr/local/avamar/var, you will see a file called ddr_info which has the information regarding the data domain.

This is the basic setup for connecting virtual edition of data domain to a VDP appliance.